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TNHP - May 2016

The shame of the Jesuits: Practiced, condoned slavery

Now suffer a steady moral decline from 'intrinsic evil'

A spotlight has fallen on a shameful chapter in the history of Georgetown University’s Jesuits, the 1838 sale of 272 African-Americans into Deep South slavery, but moral lapses didn’t end there, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He graduated from Fordham Prep (just 41 years after Horace McKenna did), earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Fordham University, and finds it difficult to un-learn what he learned there.

By Ray McGovern

Consortium News

17 April 2016

Anti-war prophet Rev. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., was onto something with his “hunch” – in his 1987 autobiography, To Dwell in Peace – that “the fall of a great enterprise,” the Jesuit university, would end up “among those structures whose moral decline and political servitude signalize a larger falling away of the culture itself.”

Berrigan, a Jesuit himself, lamented “highly placed” churchmen and their approval of war, “uttered … with sublime confidence, from on high, from highly placed friendships, and White House connections. Thus compromised, the Christian tradition of nonviolence, as well as the secular boast of disinterested pursuit of truth — these are reduced to bombast, hauled out for formal occasions, believed by no one, practiced by no one.”

But that “moral decline” among Jesuit institutions of higher learning may have had deeper roots than even Berrigan understood. One of those deep roots is drawing national attention, an 1838 decision by the Jesuit leaders of the Jesuits’ Maryland Province and Georgetown College to improve the school’s financial health by selling 272 African-American men, women and children as slaves into the Deep South.

As New York Times writer Rachel L. Swarns described the scene in Sunday’s editions, “The human cargo was loaded on ships at a bustling wharf in the nation’s capital, destined for the plantations of the Deep South. Some slaves pleaded for rosaries as they were rounded up, praying for deliverance. But on this day, in the fall of 1838, no one was spared: not the 2-month-old baby and her mother, not the field hands, not the shoemaker and not Cornelius Hawkins, who was about 13 years old when he was forced onboard.”

Rev. Thomas Mulledy, S.J., the Provincial (head) of the Maryland Jesuits, sold the 272 enslaved African-Americans to Henry Johnson, the former governor of Louisiana, and Louisiana landowner Jesse Batey for $115,000, the equivalent of $3.3 million in today’s dollars, according to the Times account.(More)

Hillary and Republicans use ancient voting machines

to swindle millions of electors out of their voting rights

Why can't the U.S. nation and the Left deal with election theft?

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Reader Supported News

18 April 2016

There are two things we all need to know about the upcoming 2016 election:

1. Millions of likely Democratic voters have already been stripped from the voter rolls in critical states like Ohio. The key reporting on this has been done by the great Greg Palast, who has shown that a computer program coordinated by the Republican secretary of state of Kansas is being used in some two dozen states to steal from a substantial percentage of the citizenry their right to vote. The raw numbers are high enough that they could have a significant impact on the presidential, US Senate, House and many other elections this fall. The ACLU has now sued Jon Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, over the stripping of two million citizens from Ohio's voter rolls.

2. There is no way to verify the official tally on the electronic machines on which the majority of Americans will vote this fall. Nearly all the machines are a decade old, most are controlled by a single company (ES&S, owned by Warren Buffett) and the courts have ruled that the software is proprietary, making the vote counts beyond public scrutiny. In fact, they are beyond all independent monitoring altogether. In many key swing states (including Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Arizona) GOP governors and secretaries of state will have a free hand to flip the vote count to whatever they want it to be without detection or accountability. This could turn control of our government over to the GOP come November, as it did in 2000 and 2004.

These two critical markers of the upcoming national election are at center stage in our compendium The Flip & Strip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows and Electronic Election Theft (www.freepress.org / www.solartopia.org), which we’ll be publishing at the end of April.

For some reason many on the left have had a hard time accepting these realities. But they’re in fact far more critical than the question of who will make the better Democratic candidate.

In the interim, the usually solid Josh Holland has published a piece at The Nation with which we must take issue. It challenges writings that have put forward the idea that Hillary Clinton might be stealing the primaries from Bernie Sanders. (More)

It's official: How much Putin and his ministers earn

15 April 2016

RT — With the declarations of income and property of Russian top officials published on Friday 15 April 2016 everyone can have a peek into their wallets. See if you can guess how much the president earned in 2015, and who made over 50 times more than him! (More)

Messy desks encourage creative thinking

We’ve been trained to believe that a de-cluttered desk and office are the quickest routes to becoming better thinkers and more efficient workers. And while that may provide the ideal environment for getting work done, it may not be the best environment for coming up with new ideas, so says Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

But while neatness seems to correlate with making socially-responsible decisions, it appears that messiness leads to higher levels of creative and innovative thinking. Vohs and her team conducted another test asking participants to come up with creative uses for a ping-pong ball. While those in the tidy rooms and messy rooms both came up with extensive lists, an independent assessment determined that the ideas coming from the messy room were far more creative. A separate test involving terminology on a menu also showed that terms such as “classic” were more appealing to those in the tidy rooms while “new” resonated with those in the messy rooms, suggesting to researchers that the messy workspaces correlate to innovative thinking. (More)

Almost everyone who is unhappy

with life is unhappy for the same reasons

By Travis Bradberry

March 24, 2016

Your expectations, more than anything else in life, determine your reality. When it comes to achieving your goals, if you don’t believe you’ll succeed, you won’t.

Research from LSU shows that people who believe in themselves use more metacognitive functions than those who don’t. This means that they use more of their brains and have more brainpower to solve problems. Metacognition is especially important for achievement as it ensures that you approach problems from many different angles and adapt your approach as needed. (More)

West pretends concern as ISIS occupies Lebanon

Only force able to fight ISIS is called 'Terrorist'

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. Discussion with N. Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East.

08 April 2016

By Andre Vltchek

Lebanon cannot stand on its feet anymore. It is overwhelmed, frightened and broke.

It stands at the frontline, facing Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL) in the east and north, hostile Israel in the south and the deep blue sea in the west. One and a half million (mostly Syrian) refugees are dispersed all over its tiny territory. Its economy is collapsing and the infrastructure crumbling. ISIS is right on the border with Syria, literally next door, or even with one foot inside Lebanon, periodically invading, and setting up countless “dormant cells” in all the Lebanese cities and all over the countryside. Hezbollah is fighting ISIS, but the West and Saudi Arabia apparently consider Hezbollah, not ISIS, to be the major menace to their geopolitical interests. The Lebanese army is relatively well trained but badly armed, and as the entire country, it is notoriously cash-strapped.

These days, on the streets of Beirut, Israel, one can often hear: “Just a little bit more; one more push, and the entire country will collapse, go up in smoke.”

Is this what the West and its regional allies really want?

One top foreign dignitary after another is now visiting Lebanon: the UN chief Ban Ki-moon, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. All the foreign visitors are predictably and abstractly expressing “deep concern” about the proximity of ISIS, and about the fate of the 1.5 million Syrian refugees now living in Lebanon. “The war in neighboring Syria is having a deep impact on tiny Lebanon”, they all admit.

Who triggered this war is never addressed.

And not much gets resolved. Only very few concrete promises are being made. And what is promised is not being delivered.(More)

ISIS sex slave survivor

'They beat me, raped me, treated me like an animal'

RT: SophieCo.

22 March 2016

A woman from the Yazidi people speaks about an unspeakable nightmare. Nadia Murad’s village was ravaged by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighters. All the men were killed, and she, along with thousands of other girls, was forced to become a sex slave. The horrors that Nadia described to us are happening now on a daily basis. While the big powers, the high and mighty, squabble over spheres of influence, a great crime - reminiscent of the Holocaust – is taking place virtually unnoticed. This interview is a cry for help from people facing genocide. Nadia Murad survived being an IS slave and tells her harrowing story today, on Sophie&Co.

Sophie Shevardnadze: Nadia, you used to live in the Sinjar district of Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. Your village, Kocho, was destroyed by ISIS. What happened that day, when they came to your town?

Nadia Murad: They invaded the town of Sinjar on August 3, 2014. Before seizing our village, they had already captured all the Yazidi settlements nearby. Many Yazidis had the chance to escape or hide in the mountains; but my village is far from that area, so we had nowhere to run for shelter. The militants blocked us in the village. They killed thousands of men and abducted thousands of women. Their goal was to destroy our nation and our identity. (More)

Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, died at 34

Evidence reveals neither aliens nor KGB guilty

The real Gagarin: Busting three major myths about the Soviet space pioneer

12 April 2016

Fifty-five years after the first spaceflight and 48 after Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash at the age of just 34, a cottage industry has sprung up around the first cosmonaut. Here, RT tries to detangle the man from his ever-growing mythology.

Libya’s painful lesson: Obama learned nothing from Iraq

12 April 2016

The primary problem with the Obama administration was that oil was a major consideration, former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof told RT America’s Anya Parampil.

Failing to plan for the aftermath of the US-led military intervention in Libya was President Barack Obama’s worst mistake during his eight years in the White House, the American leader acknowledged to US media on Sunday.

Michael Maloof: Well, he is right. It was on his watch and it shows that he didn’t learn a thing from our experiences in Iraq, in which we just picked up and left. The problem with Libya is that we were working with Muammar Gaddafi. We had a lot of things going. He was actually keeping the fractions together; he was like the Tito of Libya, if you will. And we were working with him to keep down the spread of Al-Qaeda. He was somewhat successful at that. I think the primary problem with this administration was that oil was a major consideration, and the French were particularly interested in moving in, taking - once the unrest began a little bit - he was interested in taking it over.

RT: What kind of plan is even possible once you remove a government? Is it not a mistake going in there and intervening, and overthrowing - like you said - a government that was cooperating with the US in the first place?

MM: They went in without a plan. That was very clear because of the way the country just fell apart, and various fractions took over, various clans took over the entire country, which then allowed ISIS and Al-Qaeda to fill that power vacuum, if you will. It was clear that the administration’s goal was regime change, and we should have learned from, again, Iraq that you shouldn’t be doing that without having something viable. And we certainly didn’t have it in Iraq. Now with Libya it’s the same. And Hillary Clinton was very much responsible for that.(More)

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